


therefore unreadable

by gogollescent



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-08 22:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1958649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Whoever told you that Mila was my mother?" said Garak, amused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	therefore unreadable

 

"My mother was a scullery maid," said Garak, "when she began working for my father. And by her own admission, not a diligent one: she would rinse the floor without scrubbing the slime out of the cracks, she would hide dirty dishes behind clean ones, and she sent the desert fowl to the chef’s pot half-plucked."

Viz., still barbed. His companion frowned; was perhaps imagining that untrustworthy mouthful. “She wasn’t dismissed?”

"Why, no," said Garak, "although if you like, I will tell you the version of the tale in which she was."

Stern, painterly look from the dark young eyes. The unshakeable thought that his expression, in whatever stage of sly recalcitrance, had just been caught and mummified, a king down in deep sand. Or skinned, perhaps; salted through, hung up to cure, against a hungry winter. Pacifist Ziyal would have left her birds quite nude.

There was no need for her to speak. “I bow to your wishes.”

She smiled.

 

* * *

 

The scullery maid secured her employment through discretion. Even as, by day, she sniffed cutlery to see if it could pass for clean in a dim light—closing her eyes, opening her nostrils, and sensing chemical pathways of filth mapped brilliantly by blindness—by night she heard the secret concerns of footmen, gardeners, valets and charwomen. No, it’s not for me to say how or why these confessions came to her—when conversing with a young lady of good breeding—

In any case, she was as happy to conceal sins as stains, so long as her dear friends returned the favor.

 

* * *

 

"And then she began to get promotions," said Ziyal, knowingly. "Until she became the most wonderful housekeeper—"

"Ah, I’m afraid you’re mistaken there. She never left the kitchens. Tain’s housekeeper then was the same woman who now holds the position. Mila is her name."

Ziyal’s face was a study in disbelief. She turned her head this way, that, like one of the northern continent’s desert nomads, scanning the horizon for a hint of a sandstorm. She did not have her father’s sumptuous neck, but you could see, in the edgy strain along the pulled-taut ridge, a shade of his fugitive anger, his incredulity at a world out of concert with his desires. But after all Ziyal was a young girl, who nursed many romantic notions. It was only a moment’s uncomfortable quiet.

"I thought you said you were going to tell me something you’ve never told anyone else," she said. "Not another… story."

"Whoever told you that Mila was my mother?" said Garak, amused. Then: "Oh. Dr. Bashir. You shouldn’t trust humans, my dear. They only have four senses.*"

He remembered, belatedly, that in the matter of perception Ziyal took after her ridge-nosed mother. This time she held his gaze.

"I’ll tell you about Mila," he said, by way of apology. "It won’t take long."

* A common saying among Alpha Quadrant humanoids with a sense of smell sufficiently developed to replace or drown out sight.

 

* * *

 

Mila was not only Tain’s housekeeper in the days when my mother was but a lowly maid; she had in fact been inherited by Tain from his father, after that distinguished gentleman’s death in the oubliettes of the Tal Shiar. How much older was she than Tain? Hard to tell, with a woman like Mila; she exuded a sort of hard agelessness, like an animal that runs till it dies. Rather a lovely specimen. Very much in the classical mold of the Dread Epoch, with the bone structure of an adze and the complexion of a dry riverbed. Yes, Ziyal, I know you thought we were kin until a moment ago, but I hardly see—all right. I will limit my enumeration of her charms to objective certainties.

(In truth she always seemed ancient to him. Even when her dark hair was touched with just one streak of gray, which she dyed, for a two-year period, the blue of his father’s eyes.)

She did know my mother. In fact, she introduced them. Took the girl under her wing, as you might say. Persuaded her to give up footmen and gardeners and valets, and set her sights on—

Yes, it was that simple. My father never troubled himself with inhibitions of that kind. He viewed it as necessary maintenance. He’s always been careful of his tools.

I never pun.

But for the same reason, he did not take her into his confidence, unlike her poorer lovers. He summoned her to attend on him after taxing evenings, and that was all. And she soon found that his preferment did not protect her from the household’s scorn, now unconstrained by fear of blackmail. Mila had selected the child because, paranoid old spy-servant that she was, she disliked her master’s habit of going outside his home for any need—she would have preferred to see him married, but it was obvious that Tain, having grasped that an administrator in the Obsidian Order need not sate the societal impetus against bachelorhood, would have made it a very long engagement. Thus the pretty, closelipped, lazy girl. It was not a scheme designed to improve the young maid’s prospects.

So Mila plotted, and Tain, well, and my mother chafed sadly under the newfound censure of her peers—I think it was the first time she ever found herself without the upper hand in a contest of corruption. She had given up everything for a chance at Tain’s ear, and received only abuse for her trouble.

So she hatched a scheme of her own. She stopped taking the contraceptives Mila provided for her, and she waited for Tain to call her to his chambers. The career of an agent of the Obsidian Order is one long string of taxing nights, and shortly she had gotten what she wanted.

Now the correct thing to do, at that point, would have been flee. Never mind that she had no money and no friends: from another country, she would have had something to bargain with, which was distance. The same thing Mila had feared from all those courtesans—they lived outside her sphere of influence. But the maid had ridden so far on the slavering hound of other people’s shame, and it seemed to her that to stop would be to surrender her hard-won progress. She stayed. Said, set me up in a household of my own, or I will tell the world of your bastard.

Ah, Cardassia—the last place in the galaxy where the word civilization still has meaning, I sometimes think. You disagree, but I am too old to argue with, so you will humor my patriotism. Well. Tain could not publicly own an illegitimate child, it was true. But he had more options than my mother supposed.

Mila, ever forethoughtful, convinced him that a spare son was not a bad thing to have on hand. However dubious the getting. Certainly the son had more potential than the mother, even as a knot of cells in her ungrateful womb. And Tain said, See that it is done.

Mila went to my mother. She had been locked in a room that once belonged to Tain, as a small boy, while negotiations were proceeding between Tain and his housekeeper. Who said, my dear, you’re a fool; and my mother, presumably, said she knew. She had been thirty hours in the dark cold room, surrounded by relics of her employer’s infancy. She was clear-eyed at last. Mila saw that. So she told her, briefly, that Tain would have her killed whatever she did, but that there was one thing she might do to earn his pity, and save the child.

I don’t know if you know this, but Cardassian women have much shorter pregnancies than Bajorans, or this might have unfolded otherwise. But never mind. A few weeks later my mother laid me, handed me to Mila, and drank a cup of vole poison.

 

* * *

 

Ziyal looked much as she had when he’d told her about the half-plucked poultry. Except, he realized, looking more closely, for the tears that stood gleaming in her eyes.

"What was the  _point_?”

"I shouldn’t have told you this," he said, suddenly abashed. "Please don’t think on it. When you asked, I think, you perhaps—assuming, as I know you did, that Mila was my mother—it must have seemed a rather tender story. For him to trust one person, and for so long. And indeed it is, leaving out my unfortunate parent. Who was not, you will remember, such a kind or noble person, much like her child. She thought she saw a way to benefit herself. She miscalculated badly." He glanced up at the low ceiling of the holosuite, and saw in his mind’s eye the Promenade, the arching pylons, his detestable shop, and the whole dark star of the station, floating in space like a spider on a fine self-woven noose. "That too is a family trait."

Ziyal said nothing for so long he was afraid she would depart. But she only rolled onto her stomach, folding arms under chin on the hot rock, and shut her eyes.

"Tell me the story where she was fired for leaving barbs on the chickens," she said.

For a long moment he did not even know of what she spoke.

"All right," he said then. "But you may have to help me. With the details. You have an artist’s mind, and will do better than I at painting the scene as it was."

 

* * *

 

A few weeks later Ziyal died. Wastefully, and pointlessly, in her twice-damned father’s arms. At the funeral Bashir got badly drunk, and began directing cold, supercilious looks in Garak’s direction, the sneer hardly veiled by the redness of his eyes.

"I know what you told her, you know. Your little fable. Why the hell did you do it? ‘Something you’d never told anyone’, right, I suppose she should have seen the hole in that. It’s not as though you recycle your lies."

Garak opened his mouth, and paused. “Tain,” he said.

"That’s right," said Bashir. "Four weeks in a prison camp with a dying man, and you can learn quite a bit about what and who he’s done." It was unlike the doctor to be so crude, but then, so was this confrontation. Death was a great unmaker. It did not merely kill who it killed, but marred the character of all who loved them, bending their thoughts and wishes to permanent disorder. And, of course, the alcohol helped.

He thought of asking: why believe Tain and not me? But they both knew the answer to that.

"I suppose you told her the truth," he said.

"Of course I did. She deserved it, after the sort of hoops you made her jump through."

"She never told me."

Bashir looked into his drink. “Why would she? She was probably embarrassed for you. Still playing the same old tricks.”

That struck him as probable. She was so gentle, his poor young friend. Sensitive to his fragilities. But if she had come to him, if she had said, how can you do this, again and again, he would have said…

What did it matter? It was his own fault. He should have told her then. Not a true story, no. Not a kind one. It was in fact the lie Mila had told him, when first he asked her who his mother was. Sitting by him on his father’s childhood bed, in the dusty gloom, absorbing the scents and shadows of indifference, she had described it all; and he had been able to imagine it in every detail. The drab young woman’s crossed, calm hands. Her resignation, as Mila urged her to destroy herself.

Later, he understood it as a prelude to the literature of sacrifice that would compose his best, longest education: as a prelude to duty and to love. An explanation, for why she had spent sixty years in the Tains’ service, never changing, cool and rigid as an unmourned corpse, or a painting when the artist was gone. Why she, who was his mother’s last remains, averted her eyes when he looked at her and asked for honest counsel. He had had many questions. How to live, serve, and remake himself.

None of it would placate Dr. Bashir. And why should it? It did not placate Garak. “I have no others,” he said, turning away.


End file.
